The agricultural machine manufacturer has a subscription service that lets owners repair their own equipment. Why is barely anybody using it? There is something wrong with the tractor. The water-in-fuel sensor, a small device embedded in the John Deere machine that monitors the integrity of its diesel engine, is disconnected. And I've got to fix it.

The Trump Alien'Disclosure Speech' Rumors Are Reaching a Fever Pitch The US government has been sharing more information about UFOs. That's fueling excitement over the possibility of the president announcing that humans are not alone. In 2006, Donald Trump was firing people on and Dr. Phil was daytime television's reigning tough-love therapist. Twenty years later, the former is president of the United States, the latter, his informal UFO ambassador--recently trusted with unreleased government files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) to gauge how the public might handle what's inside. Here's what comes in stages.

The new joint operation uses laser-based technology capable of detecting, tracking, and disabling commercial drones linked to human and drug trafficking. A US Border Patrol agent demonstrates the use of a drone near the border with Mexico. Defense agencies of Mexico and the US have announced they are implementing a new collaborative strategy to combat drones used by criminal organizations. The operation, dubbed High Eagle, or Águila Alta, builds on recent tests of anti-drone technologies carried out along the border between the two countries. The first phase of the strategy took place between August 31 and September 2 along the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.

A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely "spooking people" inside big labs. Earlier this year, Rishub Jain left his position as an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind after a revelation. As he worked on new models, he came to believe that he and everyone else on AI's frontier were ceding control. By using AI's coding skills to accelerate work on the next generation of models, he was removing himself from the equation. AI labs hope to evolve this approach to the point that AI will improve itself indefinitely, a process known as recursive self-improvement.

AI leaders worry antitrust law could stand in the way of what they view as an increasingly urgent push to coordinate a slowdown in AI development. OpenAI has asked members of Congress in recent weeks for clear guidance about whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI development would be legal, people close to the company tell WIRED. Substantive coordination on safety between AI labs may risk running afoul of antitrust law, the people say, which poses a significant obstacle to bringing major tech giants on board with the effort. Last weekend, OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post arguing that the best path forward for the AI research world includes "coordinating to slow down future development," which he thinks will be key to ensuring that self-improving AI systems are safe. In the short term, he expects " voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established."

Charlie Kirk Was Shot a Year Ago. Experts say conspiracy theorizing about the identity and motive of Charlie Kirk's killer will likely continue for a long time to come. In the days after the assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point cofounder Charlie Kirk, the online reaction was a mess. Graphic videos of the shooting were everywhere within minutes of his death, far-right figures called for violence and vengeance, and right-wing lawmakers and influencers called for the cancellation --and worse--of anyone celebrating. Then, the conspiracy theories began .

'Killmonger Locs' Are Everywhere in Video Games. The villain's hairstyle has become a default for Black video game characters because it's easy to code. Danielle Udogaranya is changing that. When the life-simulation game was released in early access, Danielle Udogaranya's hand ached at the thought of making new Black hairstyles for it. It wasn't because she didn't want to create for the game.

In Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, becoming a "ghost" means running afoul of the state. In this excerpt, a secret agent discovers it doesn't take much. True diligence is I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after. For a long time I wrote in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn't secretly wish to be a spy? We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear--when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in--but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.

InquiryIQ, a previously unreported prototype, tested a model from xAI, maker of Grok, to surface associates, social accounts, and other information about people identified through Clearview. In 2020, face-recognition firm Clearview AI became infamous for scraping more than 3 billion photos from the internet to turn faces into names for police and security professionals. Now the company is experimenting with trawling the web again, this time using AI to potentially help law enforcement fill in the person behind the name--who they are, who they know, where they live, and what they've left behind online. Clearview has quietly built and tested what it describes as an experimental AI "analyst assistant," WIRED has learned. Called InquiryIQ, the unreleased tool is designed to take details an investigator unearths from a Clearview search and then automatically fan out across the web--opening webpages, analyzing images, and assembling what it finds into a profile containing the possible employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics of a person police are investigating. InquiryIQ's interface states that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions" as it searches, according to code for the tool analyzed by WIRED.

A Teen Girl's Death Is Prompting Calls to Ban Choking in Porn Despite the many health risks, sexual strangulation has become popular among young people--with some experts blaming adult content for normalizing it. An Australian teenage girl's death, suspected to be preceded by consensual "choking" during sex, has renewed calls to ban showing the act in porn . This latest tragedy, reportedly believed to involve sexual strangulation, comes just months after the UK banned porn showing the practice. But despite all the noise, most people still aren't aware of just how dangerous the trend is. Sexual strangulation or "choking" during sex, as it's referred to colloquially, has become wildly popular--especially among adults aged 18 to 35, despite the risk of severe injury, brain damage, and even death.